Quench dynamics and Hall response of interacting Chern insulators

Schüler, Michael; Budich, Jan Carl; Werner, Philipp

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.100.041101

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Quench dynamics and Hall response of interacting Chern insulators

Schüler, Michael Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California, USA
Budich, Jan Carl Institute of Theoretical Physics, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Werner, Philipp Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

02.07.2019

Published in:

Physical Review B. - 2019, vol. 100, no. 4, p. 041101

English We study the coherent nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting two-dimensional systems after a quench from a trivial to a topological Chern insulator phase. While the many-body wave function is constrained to remain topologically trivial under local unitary evolution, we find that the Hall response of the system can dynamically approach a thermal value of the postquench Hamiltonian, even though the efficiency of this thermalization process is shown to strongly depend on the microscopic form of the interactions. Quite remarkably, the effective temperature of the steady-state Hall response can be arbitrarily tuned with the quench parameters. Our findings suggest a way of inducing and observing low-temperature topological phenomena in interacting ultracold atomic gases, where the considered quench scenario can be realized in current experimental setups.

Faculty

Faculté des sciences et de médecine

Department

Département de Physique

Language